Brief definitions of several terms used herein follow, which may be helpful to certain readers. Such definitions, although brief, will help those skilled in the relevant art to more fully appreciate aspects of the invention based on the detailed description provided herein. Such definitions are further defined by the description of the invention as a whole and not simply by such definitions.
Asset instanceA specific impression, airing, or advertising event. Forexample, a media asset may be CNN-Monday throughFriday. An Asset instance of this asset may beCNN-Tuesday-8:05pm-AC360.Media assetAdvertising media that can be published for purposesof advertising. Examples include television airing,radio spot, newspaper spot, internet publisher page.For example, a television media asset may comprisesome combination of station-geography-program-day-hours such as WXGN-Florida-SixO'ClockNews-Monday-6pm, or may be a more general set such asFOX-Monday through Friday.AssetSame as media assetMediaSame as media assetStationSame as media assetStation-ProgramSame as media assetStation-Program-Same as media assetDay-HourProductSomething that is being sold by an advertiser. Theproduct and advertisement are usedinterchangeably—each product is assumed to have oneor more advertisements that can be aired on televisionmedia. The contents of the advertisement areconsidered part of the product for the presentsystem in order to simplify the description.AdvertisementSame as Product
A variety of methods have been used in the past for television advertising targeting.
Television Ad Targeting Using Intuition
The first method which is widely used today uses human intuition and insight to identify which television programs to purchase. This method can be effective, however, doesn't scale. There are over 2 million possible television advertising placements during a year even with conservative estimates of airing frequencies, and many more when local broadcast schedules are considered (there are 5,000 local stations), and so picking the right times, geographies, and programs to run is difficult.
Television Ad Targeting Using the Nielsen Television Panel
A second method for targeting television advertisements is to use Nielsen age-gender ratings. Nielsen's viewer panel was developed in the 1960s and consists of 5,000 to 25,000 households spread around the United States. The viewing panels themselves range from fully electronic recording systems to paper-based diaries.
Nielsen panelists track their viewing habits, and then Nielsen aggregates the data and shows the age-gender demographics for each program. A media buyer can then decide whether to purchase advertisement for this programming if it seems to be like the audience that would want to purchase the product.
Television Ad Targeting Using Historical Ad-Media Performance
Another form of television ad targeting uses historical data from previous advertisement airings on media, and their performance, in order to predict whether buying another airing with the same program-station-day-hour might be effective. This technique is most commonly used for “Television long-form buying”, also known as “Infomercials”. In order to determine if “DIY Saturday midnight-1 am” will perform well, the ad company looks for how the ad performed in this same time-slot and station a week prior (for example). The best example of this method that we know of besides our own work in this area is from Tellis et. al. (2005) which presents an automated system of this kind. The system includes lag-terms for ad placements, and responses collected over the past several hours. Tellis, G., Chandy, R., MacInnis, D., Thaivanich, P. (2005), “Modeling the Microeffects of Television Advertising: Which Ad Works, When, Where, for How Long, and Why?”, Marketing Science, Marketing Science 24(3), pp. 351-366, INFORMS.
Television Ad Targeting Using One-to-One Techniques
Television Ad Targeting should theoretically be able to be performed by analyzing an individual television viewer's activity to determine what products they're interested in, and delivering an advertisement to that specific person.
At the moment this technology is not available for television except in some very limited—generally research-related—cases. Most of the work in this area comprises experiments, tests in the New York area where some one-to-one capabilities have been installed via the cable system in that area, and academic studies. There are technological problems around both tracking viewer activity, as well as delivering an ad to them without delivering it to lots of other customers. The overwhelming majority of televisions as of 2011 have no capability for individualized tracking or ad delivery.
One-to-one television ad targeting was first discussed as early as the 1970s. Personalized television programming has since been proposed by Smyth and Cotter (2000) and Spangler et. al. (2003). Smyth, B. and Cotter, P. (2000), “A Personalized Television Listings Service”, Communications of the ACM, Vol. 43, No. 8, August 2000, pp. 107-111; Spangler, W., Gal-Or, M., May, J. (2003), “Using data mining to profile TV viewers”, Communications of the ACM archive, Volume 46, Issue 12 (December 2003), pp. 66-72. One-to-one targeting in a TV context has been described conceptually by (Arora, N., Hess, J., Joshi, Y., Neslin, S., Thomas, J. (2008), “Putting one-to-one marketing to work: Personalization, customization, and choice”, Marketing Letters, Vol. 19, pp. 305-321.). Chorianopoulos, Lekakos, Spinellis (2003) and Lekakos and Giaglis (2004) ran experiments which tested the effectiveness of personalized advertising on television. Chorianopoulos, K. and G. Lekakos and D. Spinellis (2003). “The Virtual Channel Model for Personalized Television”, Proceedings of the 1st EurolTV conference: From Viewers to Actors pp. 59-67. They recruited experimental subjects and had them fill out surveys to classify them into segments. They next used a training set of users who had explicitly indicated their interest in some advertisements to predict interest in the new ads.